Slashdot Mirror
US Workers Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots (cnn.com)
There's a surprising prediction for the next 15 years from the world's second largest professional services firm. An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Millions of workers around the world are at risk of losing their jobs to robots -- but Americans should be particularly worried. Thirty-eight percent of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, according to a new report by PwC. Meanwhile, only 30% of jobs in the U.K. are similarly endangered. The same level of risk applies to only 21% of positions in Japan.
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
Would it kill CNN (or slashdot for that matter) to include things like references, facts, and arguments to back up conclusions?
It would since those often don't exist.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
It makes perfect sense.
If your working contribution costs more to automate than it takes to pay your wage, you will be safe from automation (at least until automation drives down the costs of further automation sufficiently to resolve this case).
If your wages are on par with, or greater (amortized over time) than the costs of replacing you with automation, your job is at high risk of being eliminated to automation as a cost saving measure.
Combined, the only "safe" class of workers are those in a situation where automation is, for some reason other than cost, unable to replace them, which is a category that gets eroded quickly due to increasingly capable robot and software designs.
Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)
A machine doesn't have to replace all of the things a tech can do in total, or in one machine.
For example, a washing machine doesn't replace all the things a domestic servant did in 1900, but a washing machine, dryer, dish washer and a vacuum cleaner in total replace a significant fraction of them.
Some machine learning algorithms actually do better than humans in some cross-correlation activities than humans, but are generally relatively specific to the task to which they are designed. This is becoming less a function of programming in the traditional sense, but more a case of selecting strategies and components and training and validation sets, although that's still a complicated task, but ironically one that can be increasingly handled by automation to select those elements and I've used genetic algorithms to select elements for machine learning tasks before.
Eat the Rich
- there is always somebody poorer than you.
You can't handle the truth.
Don't be a moron. This has nothing to do with minimum wage possibly getting set at a reasonable number. They are going to do it either way and you know it, so stop pushing your absurd political agenda.
The op was making the quite valid point that a reasonable minimum wage only accelerated the problem. This was brought to you by the single ruling party of the invisible hand.
The Moravec's paradox of jobs
This is just another aspect of de-skilling. Since the 1990's the fad has been for people to perform "processes" rather than jobs. The idea being that so long as you adhere to the "process", all your actions will be of the same high quality as your co-irkers. Ha!
But as soon as you are able to write down a formal description of your job, you have effectively written a computer program for doing it. So the most easily replaceable jobs will be the ones that require little judgement, little experience (esp. when there is no possibility of having to deal with exceptions) and simple interfaces to other "cogs" in the great machine.
So if you can replace a personnel officer with a computer, then companies will do it. Just feed in the parameters for the sort of people you wish to hire. Merely give the machine stock replies to the most common workplace complaints. Give it an algorithm for employee assessment - and let it it do its thing. It won't replace the entire personnel dept. But if it can perform the mundane operations, it should considerably cut the number of actual people required to support the company.
And it it this reduction - rather than complete replacement - of mid-level and managerial posts that is where the job losses will occur.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In a world where no one works, and no one earns income - who is left to buy the output of the robots?
Capitalism driven production REQUIRES consumers with disposable income. The one cannot exist without the other. To save capitalism, you need to save the consumer.
Most people, actually, if you're sitting here surfing the net on your laptop.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."